I was in the middle of getting some paperwork done so that I could get some document completed that needed his name and was then told the President had died. We were on some aircraft so the news was presented as uncertain. The rest of the dream was about whether I could still get the paperwork accepted even if it had his name on it.
Not mentioned at Drudge so it isn’t true. Never dream about politics. Very unusual.
For more detail, A Total Of 18 States Have Joined Texas’ Lawsuit. The conclusion:
I find these arguments compelling. I can’t conceive of any reason for the SCOTUS to refuse to hear the case. Especially when the case is supported by 18 cases, led by Texas.
Plus this: Trump Administration Will Join Texas Lawsuit Against Battleground States.
There is also this today which I found quite interesting.
Of course, the idea that men who identify as more masculine would be more supportive of the president isn’t that much of a shocker considering they have been among his biggest fans from the beginning. According to the AEI survey, that was true this year as well: When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump.
Apparently, the way this is presented by a typically lefty source, being a masculine male is a bad thing, but I can live with it.
To appreciate just how idiotic those who oppose Donald Trump are we have this that has just been sent to me: Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Debt. It’s by no less an authority than Paul Krugman who notoriously when asked when the stock market might turn up after the American election in 2016 replied, “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Now we have this from the same authority:
The bottom line is that government debt just isn’t a major problem these days. Which brings us back to the politics.
Joe Biden has promised to “build back better,” a slogan that translates into proposals to spend big sums on infrastructure, climate policy, education and more, largely with borrowed money. And that’s very much the right thing to do; business may see only limited returns to investment, but we’re in desperate need of more public investment, broadly defined (for example, including spending on children).
So we will have Daniel Andrews as the American president. I might just supplement this with a post by Steve Hayward at Powerline discussing Modern Monetary Theory.
The hottest thing among leftist political economists is “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT), which holds that a sovereign government can borrow and spend all the money it wants because it can’t actually default on its own currency. This warmed-over Keynesianism wouldn’t get anywhere except in a time of unusually low interest rates and very low inflation.
I’m not sure that the actual inflation rate is all that low, but interest rates are well below anything representing the actual opportunity cost of capital. Government spending is the new black (or perhaps the new red in both of the metaphorical senses of the word).
The thing that gets me about the bureaucracy voting left is that they only show how ignorant they are of anything that might make a community peaceful and prosperous. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith once said. If Joe Biden (or Kamala Harris) makes it to the Oval Office we will get to see just how much ruin there really might be.
Nothing that has happened in the past four years has made me regret my support for Donald Trump in 2016. We shall see what fools like LIQ will have to say in 2024 should Joe actually get there.
The foreign policy of the Deep State was on display in The Oz this morning: Trump’s strategic mess will take years to repair. If we go back to 2017 or thereabouts, my memory is of North Korea starting on a program of nuclear weapons development along with developing the delivery systems to make their existence a genuine threat. This was the historic result of American weakness in dealing with both North Korea and China. So what does the writer – a former senior CIA analyst, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia, chief of station in Asia and the CIA’s director of public affairs – have to say?
Not only did Trump pursue a love affair with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and remain smitten with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he also badmouthed America’s European allies when he was not undermining them outright.
Has the news also not reached the CIA that Russia is no longer a communist country attempting to subvert our political and economic system, but has been replaced by Communist China as our largest foreign policy problem of the moment. And goodness, Trump “badmouthed” Europe for not contributing what they had actually promised to pay for their own defence.
Did anyone ever actually worry about what side of the international divide Donald Trump was on? As for Biden, his own personal history, along with that of his son, ought to be a genuine concern for the future. Confronting Chinese aggression in the Pacific is unlikely to be high on his agenda. Articles such as this only add to my worries about the future since it reminds me just exactly what Trump was getting at in referring to the Deep State.
Fisking “You Might be a Socialist” . Complete ignorance everywhere about the notion of what actually constitutes socialism. As has been asked elsewhere, was the Roman Republic a socialist state because they build roads? They also had slaves, so does that count?
The general ignorance of how an economy works is so widespread that you have to wonder how soon this will disappear in a mist of incomprehension.
Oxford study says chance of intelligent life elsewhere very low.
The statistical chances of their being other intelligent life in the universe are “exceptionally rare,” according to a new study from the University of Oxford.
In the paper, scientists from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, theorize that as life evolved on earth, in many cases it depended on a series of unlikely “revolutionary transitions.” Given how late intelligent life evolved on this planet, the chances of similar developments happening on other planets, before they are no longer able to sustain life, were highly unlikely, they said.
“It took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions resulting in intelligent life to unfold on Earth,” they wrote in the paper published last month. “In another billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will make Earth uninhabitable for complex life.
“Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude,” the wrote. “In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.”
Given the distances no one will ever know one way or the other but the possibility that this is all there is remains genuine. Much too much improbability for the necessary sequences ever to have happened elsewhere. Still, it is absurd to think that my consciousness and yours are all the self-reflection that the universe has ever created.
Comes along with this: Ware County tested Dominion tabulators: Equal number of votes yielded 26% ‘lead’ for Joe Biden.
Using sequestered Dominion Equipment, Ware County ran an equal number of Trump votes and Biden votes through the Tabulator and the Tabulator reported a 26% lead for Biden. 37 Trump votes used in the equal sample run had been “Switched” from Trump to Biden. In actual algorithmic terms this means that a vote for Trump was counted as 87% of a vote and a vote for Biden was counted as 113% of a vote. Those conducting the test were so shocked that they ran the same ballots again. The same results appeared.
As Orwell put it so well, “Freedom is slavery”. Why have democracy if it’s going to give you the wrong result?
“Multiple sources” are what in other contexts are known as socialist scum.
LET ME JUST ADD THIS: I looked up “freedom is slavery” and this is what it apparently meant in Ingsoc:
“Freedom is slavery because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.”
That sounds so modern I am astonished we don’t actually hear it said by our modern socialists. In fact the conclusion is said, which the lockdowns are perfect examples of. They are taking away our personal freedoms to free us from danger. Why aren’t we more grateful, they ask, but never seem to stick around for the answer.
There’s even a book about it: The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. Here’s the book description.
Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.
The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.
Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population.
The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.
For most people it will be quite a comfortable way to spend their time on earth. It’s the way that lives have been lived throughout all of previous history.
To my astonishment I have just watched a segment on Nine News about the Georgia election fraud which was straight down the line. They have probably not got around to mentioning the other states where fraud was almost equally evident since it is hard to argue with actual video footage of fake ballots being pulled from under a table. Nevertheless, there are people like LIQ who are partisan to such an extent that they are prepared to subvert democratic processes to get their candidate up. I don’t really know what to make of a mentality that can even as late in the day as this write such a vacuous piece as It’s over – Biden won fair and square. What remains fascinating is that such people exist, and in large numbers too. As is typical of such arguments, it is all generalisation with no specifics other than the usual boilerplate:
His behaviour since the election has been nothing short of scandalous. trying to tear the country apart and grossly mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic, leading to massive deaths and human misery.
I find it interesting that in this “post-election” environment, part of the approach taken by the Republicans is to remind people what a Biden presidency will look like, with CurrencyLad’s Biden’s first order of business: letting men into girls’ toilets a perfect example. There is also this which I have just come across: Trump team capitalizes on new report about small biz pessimism after November election, and there’s plenty more where that came from. Only now are many Americans waking up to just how bad a Biden presidency would be. It will be even worse than they can imagine, but at least there is a growing understanding of where things will end up.
That a proportion even among the Republican Party is content to let Biden become president even through obvious fraud is part of what is so depressing. But it won’t be over until the Supreme Court makes a decision one way or the other. The sheer anti-democratic anti-freedom idiocy of turning a blind eye to unmistakeable election fraud because you would prefer a different result from the actual one demonstrates a totalitarian mindset that if allowed to succeed will turn the West into the new feudalism. That is what The Great Reset is trying to achieve on behalf of incompetent bureaucratic elites who are filled with stupid socialist centrally-determined plans but have no idea why we have been able to create prosperity beyond anything that has ever before been achieved.
Law of Markets 